Eating Out
Most food has been made and consumed domestically throughout Western
history. Eating out was for travelers, in inns and taverns where the customers
were served more or less what would have been on the domestic table anyway.
Regular eating out, and eating out for status with special foods reserved for the
occasion, is a predominantly French institution of the Industrial Revolution.
Our words for eating out are all French or translations – hotel, restaurant, caf6,
menu, entr6e, chef (chef de cuisine), wine list (carte des vins), cover charge
(couvert), maitre d’hotel, restaurateur, hors d’oeuvres, hostess (hotesse) – only
with waiter (and waitress) do we remain stubbornly Anglo-Saxon, “boy”
sounding a bit strange in the context.
Essentially at first an upper and upper-middle perversion, and to do with the
desire to move conspicuous eating and spending into the public arena, eating
out has become vastly democratized with technology, affluence, and
overemployment – leaving less time for preparation at home. The great chefs,
who previously cooked in the great houses, moved out to the great restaurants.
The French upper classes had previously made a great public show of
attending court or church. When both these institutions declined in importance
after the Revolution, attendance at great restaurants became a substitute. The
“great codifier” Auguste Escoffier laid down elaborate and rigid rules of
cooking procedure like a pope: cuisine became “haute,” and chefs ruled
hierarchically organized vast kitchens like tyrannical cardinals. The great
restaurants came to resemble renaissance palaces or cathedrals. The very word
“restaurant” comes from the verb “to restore” and has more than practical
overtones. (The original restaurants were in fact legally “health food stores.”)
From these grand beginnings, eating out came to be imitated by the
bourgeoisie, ever anxious to give themselves upper-class airs, and finally
became general in the culture and in all Western countries.
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Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective
Eating Out
If the rituals of eating out have become less grand for the mass of people, it
still retains its aura as an “event.” The grand aspects are retained in
expeditions to restaurants offensively overpriced but ritzy (after the Polish-
French founders of the greatest of the great establishments). We spend not so
much for the food as for the entertainment value and the naughty thrill of
being (we hope) treated like royalty in an otherwise drab democratic
environment. Even lesser expeditions still have the air of an event. The family
outing to the local burger joint still has an air of preparation and difference; it
can still be used to coax youngsters to eat, and provide a mild enough air of
difference from routine to be “restorative.” Even the necessary lunch for
workers who cannot eat at home has been made into a ritual event by the
relatively affluent among them.
“Doing lunch” in the business world is regarded as a kind of sacred operation
where, the mythology has it, the most important deals are made. A puritanical
campaign against the “three-martini lunch” by the then President Carter
(Southern Baptist), had Americans as roused and angry as they had been over
the tax on tea that sent their ancestors to their muskets. The business-meal tax
deduction was fought for with passion, and the best the government could do
was to reduce its value by 20 percent. There may not be a free lunch, but it
sure as hell is deductible. Very little of this has to do with business, of course,
and everything to do with status. Just to be having business lunches at all
marks one down as a success in the world of business, for only “executives”
(the new order of aristocracy) can have them.
At the other end of the scale, reverse snobbery asserts itself in the positive
embrace of “junk food,” otherwise condemned as non-nutritious, vulgar, or
even dangerous to one’s health. (In fact, cheeseburgers are no more dangerous
to health than strict and specialized vegetarian diets.) Junk food can be
socially acceptable if indulged in as part of a nostalgia for childhood: the time
when we were allowed such indulgences as “treats.” So giant ice cream
sundaes with five different scoops of ice cream, maraschino cherries, pecans,
chocolate sauce, and whipped cream; sloppy joes with french fries and gravy;
malted milk shakes and root beer floats; hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, and
relish – all these are still OK if treated as a kind of eating joke. Hot dogs at
football games, or ice cream at the shore (seaside) are more or less de rigeur.
The settings in which these are eaten vary from the simple outdoors to
elaborate ice cream parlors with bright plastic furniture and a battery of
machines for producing the right combinations of fat, sugar, and starch.
Ostensibly these are for children, but adults eat there with no self-
consciousness and without the excuse of accompanying children. But for
adults, as for children, these places are for “treats,” and so always remain
outside the normal rules of nutrition and moderation.
We continue to make eating out special when we can. Romantic dinners,
birthday dinners, anniversary dinners, retirement dinners, and all such
celebrations are taken out of the home or the workplace and into the arena of
public ritual. Only the snootiest restaurants will not provide a cake and singing
waiters for the birthday boy. The family outing is specially catered for by
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special establishments – “Mom’s Friendly Family Restaurant” can be found in
every small American town (although the wise saying has it that we should
never eat at a place called Mom’s). But even in the hustle and bustle of these
family establishments the individuality of the family is still rigidly maintained.
No family will share a table with another. This is very different to the eating
out of the still communalistic East. Lionel Tiger, in his fascinating description
of Chinese eating, describes how people are crowded together in restaurants –
strangers at the same table all eating from communal dishes. And far from
having a reservation system, restaurants encourage a free-for-all in which
those waiting in line look over the diners to find those close to finishing, then
crowd behind their tables and urge them on.
The democratization of eating out is reflected in the incredible burgeoning of
fast food joints and their spread beyond the United States. McDonald’s is the
fastest-growing franchise in Japan, and has extended its operations to China.
When it opened its first franchise in Beijing, it sold so many burgers so fast
that the cash registers burned out. Kentucky Fried Chicken has now opened in
Beijing, and has become the chic place to eat in Berlin. These are humble
foods – a ground meat patty that may or may not have originated in Hamburg;
a sausage of dubious content only loosely connected to Frankfurt; deep fried
chicken that was a food of the rural American South; a cheese and tomato pie
that probably came from Naples. But they have taken the world by storm in
one of the greatest eating revolutions since the discovery of the potato. In a
curious twist, two indigenous foods of the East are rapidly turning into the fast
food specials of the yuppies who would not be seen dead eating the proletarian
hamburger: the Japanese raw-fish sushi, and the Chinese dim sum (small items
bought by the plate) lunch. It is the oriental revenge for the McDonald’s
invasion.
The proletariat has evolved its own forms of eating out. The transport café in
Britain with its huge portions of bacon and eggs; the French bistro, which was
a working-class phenomenon before reverse snobbery turned it into bourgeois
chic, with its wonderful casseroles and bifstekpommefrit; the Italian trattoria
with its cheap seafood, again gentrified in foreign settings; the incomparable
diner in America; the grand fish-and-chip warehouse in the north of England;
the beer-and-sausage halls of Germany; the open-air food markets in all the
warm countries. If we could do a speeded-up film of social change in the last
fifty years we would see a grand ballet in which eating moved out of the home
and into the public arena on a scale which makes rural depopulation look like
a trickle. Sociologists, as usual, have still even to figure out that it is
happening, much less come up with an explanation.
Dining out became a paradise for ethnic immigrants in the huge migrations
from country to country that have characterized the twentieth century. What
started as cooking for each other has burgeoned into a huge industry of ethnic
eateries. The Chinese led the way, usually in ports and bigger cities,
Chinatowns were exotic, and it became fashionable to eat there in San
Francisco and New York. Chinese cooking with its marvelous variety and use
of virtually everything eatable became the rage. The quick-cook method with
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small pieces of food had been a necessity in China because the use of human
excrement as manure meant that thorough cooking was essential, and the lack
of fuel meant it had to be done quickly. But this was a wonder to the Euro-
American palate jaded with overcooking and heavy sauces. Chinese cooking
spread like wildfire, and Chinese families branched out endlessly to open cafes
in the most remote places.
What is more, the food was amazingly cheap. It was the first “foreign” food to
capture both the gourmet market and the populace at the same time. Although
the compromise “Cantonese,” or chow mein, version remains popular with the
masses, the gourmets pursue the Hunan and Sezchuan refined versions. Status
differences assert themselves in short order in the West. If we are all going to
go Chinese, then there has to be a form of Chinese that is more high class than
the rest. Conveniently, northern Chinese cooking stepped into the gap. Now
the cognoscenti can laugh at the vulgarity of sweet and sour pork and moo goo
gai pen, while extolling the virtues of Mongolian beef with scallions and
Colonel T’so’s chicken. The world remains safe for snobbery.
What started with the Chinese has spread to a wide variety of immigrant
cuisines. Even small towns in Europe and America now have a huge variety of
worldwide ethnic establishments. Drink has followed food, and sake and
retsina, espresso and green tea, guava juice and tequila, are available
everywhere. In all this eating out, food reflects the internationalizing trends in
fashion generally. It gives us all a chance to show off our cosmopolitanism in
a world that values it more and more. It is astonishing when we think of it. In
any one month we may order food in ten or more different languages, none of
which we speak, and which can be as different as Urdu, Thai, Cantonese,
Italian, Arabic, Armenian, and Hungarian. There is now an industry of critics
and restaurant writers as large and as attentively followed as the theater,
sports, and fashion critics. To be literate in the world of eating out – to be even
ahead of the trends (knowing that fantastic little Portuguese bistro that no one
has discovered) – is to demonstrate that one is on top of the complex
cosmopolitan civilization of which eating out has come to be a metaphor.
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